In Pursuit of Butterflies

by Matthew Oates

  It did indeed, for I was in Norfolk. There, the Wall Brown was numerous: fifteen were seen basking in evening sunlight along a 50-metre section of flint wall near Burnham Overy. Painted Ladies were here too, worn males hurtling northwards, accompanied by a few Red Admirals. White Admiral larvae were full-grown, on Honeysuckle tangles in the woods around Sheringham Park and on West Runton Heath, a ridge-top heath which had become a wood in the absence of grazing. The trip was blessed with the first Swallowtail of the season too, just.

  Diary, May 29th 2003: Things had got pretty desperate on the Swallowtail front. Then, whilst driving along the road from Horsey to Somerton a resplendent Swallowtail flew across the road right in front of my car, heading seawards. In a truly memorable moment the car veered ditchwards in reverence to the Lord of the Broads, then miraculously righted itself when all seemed lost, perhaps through Divine intervention.

  Later that day a freshly emerged male was seen feeding on Red Campion at Hickling Broad. The sunshine accompanied me home to Gloucestershire.

  June righted things, not least because it ended a run of six poor Junes. It was benign, without heavy or prolonged rain, gales and cold spells. The month began with a Spanish Plume wind, which brought in more Painted Ladies and a scatter of Red Admirals. Despite the poor May the butterfly season was running a week or so early: Marbled Whites and Ringlets were emerging well in the Cotswolds on June 13th, and White Admirals were out – very early – in Bernwood Forest, near Oxford, on the 15th.

  One of the best butterfly shows in the British Isles is to be experienced around Midsummer Day at the Great Orme (or Great Orme's Head), by Llandudno in North Wales. The Great Orme is a massif of Carboniferous Limestone jutting out into the Irish Sea. It looks more Continental than British – French or Yugoslavian Dolomite, perhaps. It is grazed by wandering sheep and Kashmir goats whose ancestors were given to Queen Victoria by the Shah of Persia. I was there on June 24th in 2003, in sublime weather – cloudless and calm. Llandudno itself was hosting the Methodist Conference and also boasted a remarkable array of loose drain covers – every street went clang, ting, ping! The Great Orme was hosting spectacular emergences of its two specialist butterflies, the local races of the Silver-studded Blue and the Grayling. Both look unique, and truly abound on the Great Orme. The Silver-studded Blue here is minuscule and dark, with deep-blue females fringed by orange beading, subspecies caernensis. It breeds on Bird's-foot Trefoil in short turf. Many of the colonies here are vast – in fact it is hard to find a butterfly in greater abundance anywhere in the British Isles. In one spot, Happy Valley, or Wyddfid in Welsh, I counted 273 in fifteen minutes along 300 metres of path. In the evenings they gather in pockets of rough grass or on low bushes in sunny, sheltered hollows to bask communally before closing their wings and roosting head-down. These communal roosts provide some of the best wildlife photography opportunities on offer in our islands. The Orme's race of the Grayling is small and pale. It flies earlier in the year than other Graylings, but otherwise behaves exactly like its cousins. On the Great Orme it is very much a butterfly of the crag and scar system, where the males battle amongst themselves and with the wind. I photographed one perched on the horn of a sleeping goat.

  June ended strongly. On the 28th the first Purple Emperors appeared, four of them battling away over the line of tall poplars that fringes the western edge of Oakley Wood, in the heart of Bernwood Forest. They meant business, for testosterone levels were high. Nearby I released a captive-bred male, ‘Percy’, on the sallow bush on which I had found him as a tiny caterpillar the previous August. It was not possible to put him on the exact bough on which he had been found, as that had been wantonly lopped off during the winter. Obviously, I was meant to find, remove and rear him. The following day the Emperors were starting in Alice Holt Forest, down in Hampshire.

  But before one could become absorbed by the Emperor there was unfinished business. A visit to Bircher Common, the Bracken-filled common north of Leominster in Herefordshire, found the High Brown Fritillary in the process of dying out. Conservation effort here had not sufficed, probably because too small an area had been maintained in suitable condition and, more crucially, because other Bracken slopes in the vicinity, under private ownership, had all become unsuitable. The matrix of habitat patches that this large and highly mobile butterfly requires had collapsed. This species can perhaps only be conserved at landscape (or metapopulation) level. Eight hectares (20 acres) of carefully maintained habitat will not suffice. I saw the last of Bircher's lovely High Browns that summer, a lone male on a tall Marsh Thistle. Down in Devon, though, the butterfly was thriving. A visit to Heddon valley on the Exmoor coast on July 1st found the butterfly in good numbers in several distinct areas, an intact metapopulation within the valley system. There was even a black one, an acute aberration. The diary relates: I got over-excited, lost my balance and fell backwards down the steep slope into a gorse bush. The black High Brown was not seen again. Sic transit gloria mundi.

  I had been invited to stay at Seven Ways, on the edge of Alice Holt Forest, for my annual adventure into the Purple world. ‘Come on in, Man,’ they said, so I did. The window of the tiny mezzanine room they gave me overlooked the copse in which male Emperors were assembling, and offered wondrous views of the Purple Hairstreak's evening flight. Seven Ways was the UK centre of a movement called Sufi Way. Please do not think this is a religious sect, weird, wacky or otherwise. Sufism is really a framework for understanding and handling religion, and wider spirituality. Seven Ways advocated a highly westernised form of Sufism developed by Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927), a sitar player and poet who brought the Sufi message to the West during the First World War. Of course, the denizens of Seven Ways understood my fixation with the Purple Emperor and, more importantly, what I was seeking, far better than I. They understood callings.

  Sufi Way had been based there for decades, the house having been built by some of Inayat Khan's pioneer converts, from theosophy probably, and bequeathed to the movement. The house itself was not ancient, rather it was timeless. It had its own idiosyncrasies. A strange humming noise reverberated on still nights. Was it the electrics, they wondered? – for the wiring was decidedly dodgy. I knew that sound, it was a Nightjar churring away in a Bracken-filled clearing up the lane. Indeed, Henry the Nightjar, as he became known, was part of the place, sitting for hours on end on a high horizontal branch of a deformed Christmas tree. He made those hot July nights his own, even as the Emperor made Seven Ways Copse his own by day. One afternoon, when the air was loaded with Emperors, I found a blue Jay's feather lying in the dust, and placed it in my hatband. The Emperor of the Woods had claimed me back.

  Based here, I could track the daily movements of male Purple Emperors. Few if any were truly resident in the copse, though the odd male would spend the night there if a bank of cloud curtailed the day. Most would depart the copse around 5 pm, dropping westwards down to the wooded slopes of the main body of Alice Holt. I followed them down in the evening, and them or others back up each midday. They were spending the mornings searching the sallow jungles a few hundred metres away westwards, down slope, in Abbots Wood Inclosure. Presumably they were searching for emerging females, then tiring of that they would ascend to the sheltered high point of Seven Ways Copse, and behave despicably. Most days there were at least half a dozen males present in or around the copse. Tussles of three or four males were regularly seen. At one point a male Painted Lady attempted to take over the favoured male territory. All hell broke loose, before the Lady was successfully removed. I would like to say that I regularly saw courtship flights and even witnessed pairings here, but the females generally avoided the place like the plague. Perhaps, like many a pub and club, it was full of males unsuccessful at the mating game.

  A small gang of us systematically searched for male territories along the ridge that runs along the eastern edge of Alice Holt before it turns into the forest itself, and runs through its northern half. All told we found nine territories that w
ere in regular use, the best of which were Seven Ways Copse itself, and scattered oaks and Sweet Chestnuts in a disused Forestry Commission car park at the northern end of Goose Green Inclosure by the village of Bucks Horn Oak. The latter was an embarrassment: I had discovered it back in 1983, but in a year when Emperors seemed to be everywhere, so I subsequently overlooked it, only realising its true significance late in the 2002 season. Half a dozen or more Emperors take up afternoon residency there.

  At the end of the Purple Emperor season, safely back at work, I had to visit Wicken Fen, north-east of Cambridge. Wicken hurts me, for it has lost its soul, the majestic Swallowtail butterfly. After the New Forest, Wicken must be the most renowned historical locality for the collecting of Lepidoptera in Britain. Sadly, the Swallowtail died out there during the 1950s, due to massive habitat changes associated with the drainage of the surrounding land. The surviving fen then vanished under a forest of Grey Willow and other scrub as the peat steadily dried out, and as the essential harvesting of reed and sedge ceased. Various attempts to re-establish the Swallowtail failed, before a lost cause was recognised. Although much of the scrub has now been cleared, re-establishing the Swallowtail is currently some way down the agenda, for the fen must first be made wetter for the butterfly's foodplant, Milk-parsley, and larger for this huge and highly mobile butterfly. Guilt wells up within me every time I visit Wicken, for I should be championing the return of machaon, but realistically I know that this is some way off. In late July 2003 the droves, or broad paths, were alive with nymphalid butterflies. The home-grown brood of Painted Ladies was hatching. I counted 95 in an hour and a half, feeding on Hemp Agrimony, thistles and, by the intriguingly named Cock-up Bridge, on Burdock. Red Admiral was even more numerous, as was the Small Tortoiseshell, but I had chosen not to count these. The Peacock, however, was even more profuse. It had become a great butterfly year.

  On the way home I stopped off in BB's old woods, Fermyn Woods near Brigstock in east Northamptonshire. I had heard reports of goodly numbers of Purple Emperors in these woods but had not previously visited. No less a being than Robin Page had seen seven flying together – as many as I have ever seen together – and had eulogised the woods in a newspaper article. Within an hour I knew I was in the best Purple Emperor wood I had visited, and that I had found a new heartland. Never before had I seen such abundance of sallows over such a large area of woodland. BB would have been ecstatic. The Emperor season was ending that day: I saw just two, but this was their true empire.

  Back home, our garden was alive with butterflies, particularly Small Tortoiseshells, with counts of this species ranging from 63 to 80 on the Buddleias. August burnt on in heat and drought, as the Azores High expressed itself wondrously over the British Isles. The average daily maximum temperature at Heathrow Airport was an impressive 26.4 degrees. Painted Ladies, Small Tortoiseshells and Peacocks abounded. A visit to Watlington Hill in the Chilterns on August 4th, under a burning sun, found Silver-spotted Skippers zigzagging at breakneck speed low over their beloved short turf, and impossible to follow. Indeed, this small, fast-flying butterfly excels in heatwave conditions, and the temperature that day reached 30 degrees.

  A long weekend on the Gower coast was necessary, primarily to celebrate a fiftieth birthday and to touch base with the man from Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, Dylan Thomas. The weather was cloudless, with searing heat by day and sweltering nights. We were staying in a hobbit-hole sunk into the dunes at Whiteford Burrows, a tin shack of green corrugated iron built in the 1920s as a shooting lodge, and sinking slowly into the sand, and into time itself. Dylan would have adored it. Painted Ladies abounded, feeding on Sea Rocket and Sea-holly in the fore dunes. Grayling colonies were scattered along the limestone crags and, more locally, in the sand dunes, where the butterfly seemed to be breeding on Sand Sedge. A strong second brood of Small Blues was showing, in the dune slacks. The final diary entry for the month reads: The month ended with Mars prominent in the south-eastern sky, the closest it's been to earth for 6000 years. It looked like stationary aeroplane headlights. And then, more lucidly: August 2003 will live forever in entomological history.

  At the end of August the phone rang. It was Gail Jeffcoate from Dorking: the Long-tailed Blue had appeared along the old coach road at Denbies Hillside, the scarp slope of the North Downs to the west of the Mole Gap – on NT land. This is one of the rarest of our migrant, or vagrant, butterflies, a once-in-a-lifetime butterflying experience. It was the sort of situation in which everything has to be dropped, excuses made and apologies delivered later. Serendipitously, I was due to head past anyway, en route to Dover. But the morning of September 1st was dominated by stagnant cloud. Would it clear? At 2 pm a large hole suddenly appeared in the cloud cover, and a worn male Long-tailed Blue instantly appeared, flitting about jerkily, like a Hairstreak, over clumps of Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea (perennial sweet pea) which grew along the old coach road banks. A group of us watched him for nearly an hour, feeding on the pea flowers. Then he was off and away at speed, and was not seen again. But a female was present, and had been busy, laying eggs on virtually all the pea clumps along a kilometre of south-facing bank. The plant was not supposed to be there at all, being a garden escapee, but that afternoon it justified its existence. Gail, Ken Willmott and I found over 100 eggs, on the sepals of the pea flowers. Some of these eggs had already hatched, and the tiny larvae had burrowed into the developing pods, for Long-tailed Blue larvae feed within the pods of the pea family.

  Inspired, the following day I searched Kingsdown Leas cliff on the coast near Dover. Here Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea abounds, but there was no sign of the Long-tailed Blue, adults or eggs. I was ten years early, for the butterfly colonised Kingsdown Leas spectacularly in 2013. Back at Denbies, the eggs were vanishing. Was it the dreaded butterfly collectors, snipping off the flower heads? Anger rose, then it became apparent that deer were browsing the pea flowers avidly – though even without the unwelcome attentions of the deer the heavy frosts of mid-October would most likely have put paid to what could have been a sizeable brood that autumn. In the event the butterfly fizzled out at Denbies in early September. Curiously, one of the first records of the Long-tailed Blue breeding in the UK was from close by, for in 1952 it was discovered to be breeding outside Ranmore post office at the top of the Denbies Hillside escarpment – on Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea. In 2003, then, the butterfly came back home.

  The autumn of 2003 was deeply memorable. It gave us the September and October we should have had at the end of the long hot summer of 1976. The Clouded Yellows were in, and in goodly numbers too. September was remarkable, especially in the South-east where grass remained brown all month, cattle were being fed hay and straw, trees went into senescence early, Ash trees aborted their keys and Elder bushes their berries. By the end of October the trees wore their late-November colours. Some unduly stressed trees died. The autumn rains held off until the end of the month, then they rather made up for lost time. Before then, the Indian summer enabled many butterflies to fit in extra broods. Second-generation White Admirals appeared in several southern woods. I even searched, over-optimistically, for second-brood Purple Emperors. In butterflying, always push limits. It is what the butterflies themselves do.

  24 Hairstreaks to the fore

  It was obvious that 2004 was going to be difficult: the Hogmanay celebrations in Edinburgh were cancelled, though the forecast storm never actually materialised. At the start of the year I visited a new site, West Woods near Marlborough in Wiltshire. Here the boys of Marlborough College and members of the town's natural history society had collected butterflies in abundance – modern rarities like the High Brown and Marsh fritillaries and the Duke of Burgundy. That was way back in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but like so many of our glorious woods West Woods was sacrificed on the altar of twentieth-century forestry, mainly in the form of monotonous Beech plantations. The sad thing was that I could feel its rich entomological history; there were fragments, tiny vistas into what
had been – secret glades, bramble bushes, sallow trees, a Blackthorn patch. Peacocks were hibernating on the ceiling of a derelict woodman's shed. Such sheds used to be commonplace when forests were regularly worked, but nowadays forestry contractors periodically arrive, as mechanised as modern farm contractors, blitzkrieg huge areas, and disappear. The impact on butterfly populations is usually negative. Many woodland butterflies seek to follow the woodcutter, in succession, and need continuity of habitat supply within a woodland system – a little-and-often approach.

  Things did improve. The first butterfly of the year was, incredibly, a Painted Lady, seen from the Isle of Wight ferry on February 4th. Another was seen at Yarmouth, fresh-looking too, and others were reported from Portland Bill bird observatory. This species is forever testing the limits of existence, pressing against its range edges. Winter immigrations are not that unusual, at least in the climate-change era. I had gone over to the island to look at the feral goat grazing regime on Bonchurch Down, Ventnor, where goats were doing a splendid job at browsing out Holm Oak and Elder invading the chalk grassland slopes. We saw a kid being born. Sadly though, the Painted Lady flattered to deceive, for 2004 became only a modest year for it.

  Spring produced just the odd fine day. Orange-tips appeared late, and were then forced to sit out some lousy weather. On May 2nd, a pair of Orange-tips that had sat for five consecutive wet days in our garden, on Tulip and Garlic Mustard heads respectively, became active as soon as the sun reappeared. They mated almost immediately. That's spring butterflies for you, great survivors, but six or seven consecutive wet days might have proven too much for them; they can take so much, but not too much, and the vagaries of spring are often too much.